On the higher order exterior and interior Whitehead products (Q506988)

The authors extend Hardie's definition of exterior Whitehead products of maps defined on spheres to maps \(\alpha_i: \Sigma A_i \rightarrow X_i, 1 \leq i \leq n,\) where \(\Sigma A_i\) is the reduced suspension of \(A_i\). The notion of interior Whitehead products is extended similarly with \(X_i = J_{m_i}(X)\), the \(m_i\)-th stage of the James construction \(J(X)\). The paper recalls prerequisites such as the James construction and the Hopf-James invariant, and presents some properties of these generalisations. The main result concerns the Hopf invariant of the generalised Hopf construction and generalises \textit{K. A. Hardie}'s Theorem 1.10 in [Q. J. Math., Oxf. II. Ser. 12, 196--204 (1961; Zbl 0103.15902)]. In preparation for the main result the authors ``follow Hardie to adapt the necessary results on the generalised Hopf construction'' and ``list [...] some properties of the separation element \(d(u,v): \Sigma A \rightarrow X\) of maps \(u,v: C_f \rightarrow Y\),'' where \(C_f\) is the mapping cone of a map \(f: A \rightarrow X\). Applying the Theriault product \(\circ\) constructed by Gray to a sequence \(X_1, \ldots , X_n\) of simply connected co-\(H\)-spaces the authors obtain a higher Gray-Whitehead product map from \(\Sigma^{n-2}(X_1 \circ \cdots \circ X_n)\) into the fat wedge of \(X_1, \ldots , X_n\). Further applications concern the spherical interior Whitehead products on spheres and on projective spaces.